Page 13 of The Shape of Silence

When finally it was as clean as she could make it, she studied the cut judiciously before deciding it needed stitching after all, being deeper than she’d originally suspected.

The man had taught her how to sew skin, though only twice before had she sewn flesh instead of cloth. She fetched the old bone needle and silk thread kept wrapped carefully in linen on the highest shelf and returned to the man, feeling the greatest amount of unease at this moment, wondering if he would wake, fevered, and resist, possibly strike out at her.

He didn’t. Aside from a hard crinkling of his brow at the first pass, he barely stirred, but she thought this was more worrisome, that he was so deep inside a fever or insensible that the piercing of his flesh scarcely disturbed him.

The stitching took time. Once she thought she might actually be sick and turned away until the feeling passed. But eventually the edges of the wound were drawn together well enough to satisfy her. Afterward she spread a generous amount of her precious salve carefully across the injury, the sharp herbal scent of yarrow and comfrey rising to her nose.

The stranger made another rough sound then and shifted weakly against the hard earth beneath him.

She glanced toward his face again, where the fever flush remained high along his cheekbones.

Even as she was pleased that the hard part was done, she frowned as she stood and collected the kettle of warm but now bloodied water. She left the house and walked to the creek, where she used leaves and stones to scrub the pot clean, rinsing it several times before refilling it. The dog followed and returned with her and thumped back down on the floor inside the house while she hung the pot over the fire again. From her stash of plants and roots, she found the dried willow bark and feverfew and added them to the water, waiting until it steeped, until it was dark and bitter, which took some time.

She had no cups and so scooped out a few mouthfuls into her bowl and when it had cooled enough, she returned to the wounded man, sitting back on her heels beside him, and hesitated only briefly before sliding one arm awkwardly beneath his shoulders.

She grunted quietly, somehow still surprised by the weight of him.

He roused a bit as she lifted him, though only barely. His eyes opened a sliver, unfocused and gray in the firelight, before drifting shut again almost immediately.

“Drink,” she told him quietly.

When he didn’t respond, she used a firmer voice as the man had done with her once. “Drink.” She pressed the rim of the bowl carefully against his mouth, and was pleased when he opened automatically, swallowing once and then again.

She sat back when it was done, lowering him again to the ground, and released her breath. That was enough for now, all that she could do.

***

The fever held him hard through the remainder of that day and into the next.

Time lost some of its usual shape inside the house. She still tended the fire and fetched water and forced herself through the ordinary tasks that kept the place and herself standing, but everything bent now around the stranger unconscious on the floor in her house. She found herself listening for changes in his breathing, listening for any sign of movement while rinsing cloths at the basin or cutting roots for the pot.

He rarely woke fully. Most often he drifted somewhere between sleep and fever, restless beneath the fur she’d laid over him, his brow drawn tight as if whatever hunted him in life continued to pursue him in sleep. Sometimes he muttered rough fragments she could not understand at all, words running together too quickly or slurred by exhaustion. Once he spoke sharply in a tone that made Charlie lift his head and stare, though the words themselves meant nothing to her beyond the anger in them.

His hands moved occasionally as though reaching for something that was not there. Twice he woke enough to try and push himself upright before pain or weakness overtook him again. The first time startled her badly enough that she nearly dropped the wooden bowl she was holding.

“Be still,” she told him instinctively, using the old man’s language as it was this man’s language as well.

The stranger only frowned harder, breathing through his teeth as he struggled half blindly. His eyes opened briefly then—gray and unfocused—and fixed on her without recognition.

“Sword,” he muttered thickly.

She stared at him a moment before conceiving a reply. “It’s here,” she told him, though in truth the sword still lay out in the forest with the rest of his things. “It’s safe.”

Whether he understood her or not, she could not tell. His head tipped back against the rolled fur she’d placed beneath it and moments later he drifted again into uneasy sleep.

By evening the house smelled sharply of fever sweat, herbs, smoke, and the bitter tea she kept trying to force into him whenever he woke enough to swallow.

Too often, irritation at this intrusion thrust upon her gave way again to that same uneasy fascination she could not quite rid herself of. She kept noticing him, the breadth of his chest beneath the rise and fall of fevered breathing and the thick muscle across his shoulders; the scars that seemed to cover almost every part of his body and the dark bruising along one side of his ribs that looked painful enough that often she winced along with him when he shifted.

The old man had once filled the place with quiet presence and routine, but this felt entirely different. The stranger’s sheer size altered the shape of the room itself, leaving little for her and Charlie.

That night she slept lightly again, though not because she feared him but rather because she kept waking to check whether he still breathed.

Several times she rose to kneel beside him and press cool water cloths against his throat and forehead the way the old man once had for her. The fever burned steadily beneath his skin. Once, sometime deep in the night while rain whispered faintly beyond the walls again, she woke to find him shivering violently despite the heat pouring off him.

She chewed her lip with uncertainty before finally relinquishing her own fur, dragging it across him and kneeling there longer than necessary afterward, watching his face in the dim firelight.

His expression fascinated her. Though he slept and was fevered nearly beyond sense, he constantly wore the faint shape of a frown, as though displeasure sat naturally upon him. He looked like a man temporarily detained against his will by his own body, and was deeply dissatisfied about it.